Something Worth Reading.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold
Everyone keeps saying this game is boring or monotonous. But I see it this way: it is a cartoon episode YOU CAN FUCKING PLAY. And that is pretty awesome. To begin with, you have a tutorial which good and you have a host of moves at your disposal. The tutorial shows you all the moves you need for combat which are mostly unneccessary. This is because you can ultimately run up to a bad guy, keep hitting A and he will eventually die. This is the biggest problem with the game and while that might seem to be enough for most people to go, “NEXT”, the game has a host of unlockables. Not to mention really great cut scenes. And just to break up the monotony every so often, we hear the banter between the two characters which are not cringe-worthy or annoying like most banter in games seems to be. The banter also gives you hope to continue with the game because the boss is just up ahead. HE SAID THAT AN HOUR AND A HALF AGO. Oh, and the duration of each level is not particularly long. You have 4 episodes to beat 4 or so different enemies (Cat Man, Gentleman Ghost, Astaroth, and Copperhead) with 4 different sidekicks (none which I have ever heard before apart from Robin): Blue Beatle, Hawkman, and Guy Gardner. In a sea of 3D platform games, this is a nice break. All they needed to do was to make the AI harder and give me more enemies. There were at best only 6 enemies on the screen and if there wasn’t, it certainly felt like it. And when you have a sidekick, that doesn’t leave many enemies to fight per area. Some parts of these levels were more aimed at how the fuck do we progress? And less about kicking arse which is another facet of the game to make it a little more interesting. Even if those parts weren’t terribly complicated.

Tournament of Legends
I love one-on-one fighting games and I was under this false pretense that Sega made mostly good games. But this might start to become a thing of the past as I can not think of a single game for the Wii where I see Sega attached to it (except maybe 1 WiiWare game which I am not even sure really counts: Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode 1) that is anything more than mediocre. Oh sure, there are games but memorable? There aren’t many. I could just instantly dismiss arcade fighters for the Wii altogether as being shit but I have played my fill that demonstrate the Wii can play the arcade-style fighter as good as any other console if it is given the right treatment (Tatsunoko Vs Capcom). You select some generic characters that say some really awkward shit. If they were your friends, they wouldn’t be anymore. You would disown them for saying uncomfortable shit. The graphics at best are not even good enough to say, “That’s good graphics…for a Wii”. Moving around the ring is less strategy and quick movement as it is, GO FUCKING FASTER YOU PIECE OF SHIT. I limp around the stage like an old woman carrying a 30KG cock. I thought I just had a Juggernaught-kind-of character (even though he was only a medium build). But alas, even the quicker ones were still slow. It tries to be more strategic-based but doesn’t have that down pat enough to make it enjoyable. Oh, and you NEED to play with a classic controller. The wii remote and nunchuck are far too shit to control than a classic controller. Thank God there is an alternative with the classic controller otherwise most of these arcade-style fighters could have a lot to be desired. There is not a whole lot you can unlock, either. It’s not a bad game but far from being a good one. Average is the best this game could be described which is where it sits with 2.5 stars.

Reload
This game is not terribly exciting. All you do is shoot targets. It wouldn’t be too bad if the actual game wasn’t buggy as fuck. Every couple of minutes a red cross would flair up on screen, freeze the game stopping me from shooting only for a second or two and when it comes good my cursor has moved to a different point on the screen. Frustrating when you are doing timed games where every second counts. The presentation of the game is average at best with menus only having the bare basics. I didn’t see any unlockables but for every level you can achieve iron through to bronze status depending on your score. I was able to get bronze (which you need to continue onto the next level) but the other medals seem impossible to obtain. The sound is some generic metal song in the background. At least this game is nice enough to give you tutorials of what you need to do each level. Even if it does repeat them when you repeat the stage (which is slightly annoying). Budget title? You bet your left nut it is. It even boarderlines on homebrew game.

Battle Rage
This game could have been better if it were on a different console, improved the graphics, improved the gameplay, improved the sound and it gave us more options. I guess what I am trying to say is it would be a better game if it were a completely different game. This game suffers from shitty controls like most titles do on the Wii. When you haven’t got the basics right, you know you’re in for a fun time onscreen. It is quite like Mechwarrior: you control a mech or robot (if you want to dumb it down) and there are different arenas. You get two robots to start with and then you have to unlock the other 6. Even in multiplayer, it was frustrating. We decided to do a co-op wondering how you could do that and they put the two of us into an arena with one other guy and the other guy kicked our arses for about 10 minutes before he was declared the winner. The AI was insanely hard, even on easy. The sound was instantly forgettable. The menus aren’t terrible but everything else about it is. The graphics themselves are laggy as fuck. It looked like we were seeing the game through 15 frames/sec instead of 25. Now I know the Wii doesn’t have a lot of processing power, but this is fucking riduclous. I have seen games with great graphics and presentation and they are not hindered by this problem.

Big Beach Sports
We eventually gave up on this game as we had to hard reset the Wii twice when playing it within a short amount of time. The menus and sound were pretty weak with a lack of options. The gameplay wasn’t too bad with beach volleyball being the best game of choice. Don’t get too excited, it wasn’t a terribly high bar to be set. It was ok at best. I’d probably have more to write about with this game if it didn’t continually fuck up. It had the potential to get a better score but if it DID work, it wouldn’t have scored THAT much better - even with the limited amount of playing we could fit in.

Beach Fun: Summer Challenge
This game made me hate life. This game felt like an episode of the Beach Shack. Except worse. It had a budget title feel to it and the sound was repetitve and annoying. The controls weren’t very responsive on ANY of the games available to you except skiing which was about as much fun as watching my mustache go. GO MUSTACHE GO! We played mini golf which is not that much fun in real life. Then you take that game and no matter if you are backswinging or swinging forward, it registers both movements as a swing. So you can’t actually replicate a golf swing. And if you can’t get that right, you might as well stick with the flagship: Wii Sports. You get the choice of 4 generic, blonde-hair characters. If these people existed in real life, they would certainly be douchebags that you would hate with your every fibre of your being and have girlfriends far more attractive than you will ever get. The choice of games are at best dull. Beach Fun? Well, they got the beach part right.

Cocoto Racer
Average. In every possible way. The menus? The sound? The controls? They all perform their basic function and nothing more. The graphics seem really generic and it is easy to fall off a race course. Multiplayer doesn’t seem to spice anything about this game up in any way. You can’t take shortcuts on the course and it handles ok. Nothing great, nothing poor, just ok. Why would you bother with this game if you have other great racing titles like Mario Kart? You wouldn’t. Even if you had money to burn, I wouldn’t bother with this game as it adds nothing extra and it is not even that much fun. The courses have additional things like storm clouds and whrilwinds on the courses adds a little bit. The AI you race against is crazy NES hard, too. Which doesn’t help your frustrations. At least you don’t have to get upset learning the game like I have with so many other titles.

Chrysler Classic Racing
Technically this is a piss poor game. During the cut scenes at the start that poorly explain why we have a 12 year old nerd who is capable of buying a $3250 car and driving it contains no voices with the subtitles. Making this look totally terribly poverish. The graphics look fresh out of a game circa 1994 that I would have played on an old 486 and the sound sounds like it came from a game circa 1994 that I would have played on an old 486, too. The menu is totally shitty looking. Must have spent a whole 5 mins in MS Paint doing up the whole menu system. The AI is a piece of piss to beat. Also when you try and muscle other cars out of the road, regardless of what car you have, they always slow you down, drive you off the track or into a wall. And you can upgrade your car FAR too fast. I raced 3 times and came 3 twice and first one and was able to buy ALL upgrades to my car. I haven’t finished this game but give it a few more hours and I will. What makes me come back to this game is not the bad retro look. It is a tonne of fun and the controls aren’t shitty which is better than a lot of other games already. You can buy more new cars (when you unlock them) but ultimately the first car is just like all the other cars. Especially since you can beat the AI with it over and over. When you drive around the track, you collect power ups of some sort. I am not sure what all of them do or how to use them but it doesn’t take away from the game.

Ultimate Shooting Games
The menu is fucking terrible. Before I have played a single game (of which there are 3), the menu makes it look like I am about to walk into a proverbial shit fight. But alas, I was pleasantly susprised. The three games you can play are Karous, Radio Allergy, and Chaos Field. All of which I have never heard before and while that ususally signals shitty games that never made it across the ocean, this doesn’t necessarily apply here. I have played far worse games than these three. Chaos Field is the most fun with tidy graphics and easy, intuitive controls. In fact, all three games feel more or less the same with some small variations. On Karous though, there is small intelligable font across the screen which gets annoying after each stage. All of them are pretty enjoyable and mindless shooters but they are no R-Type.

Gunblade NY & LA Machineguns Arcade Hits Pack
If you have played these at the arcade, you will be happy to know the port across was successful. For those who have no idea what these games are, they were two arcade-style shoot em ups in the vein of the Virtual Cop series. You can play multiplayer or solo where you ultimately hold down the fire button and just aim where it needs to go. It’s a lot more exciting and the graphics suit the console as they belong to circa 1999. The arcade game had two massive guns on a turret and you just aimed loosely at the screen. This time, the port over has accruate shooting which would change this from 4 starts to around the 2 stars (at best) as the whole pivitol focus is on the aim of your shot. You don’t need to be a Counterstrike or a COD: Black Ops enthusiast to enjoy this game. Hell, I hate those types of games and love this shit. However, what prevents games like this from getting a higher score is the fact that they were designed to eat up kids money. Just like Dogbert sucks money from people’s pockets as they go through the bug scat cleaner. Which means the games are short. Woefully short. Beamsy and I finished both games in an hour. Replayability? Depends on how often you want to take a trip down memory lane. Not often? Then I dare say you won’t find much to come back to. After the first game we unlocked rapid fire which was ironic in a sense as that was the first fucking weapon’s abilities. But, rapid fire was better than the first and you could activate it by using the D-Pad. But ultimately, it was still the same game. Regardless, this was still highly enjoyable during its brief run.

In addition to the post I just made of public torrent list, I have found a project called snakebite (thanks to APC mag). It is an easy way to setup a torrent tracker. It is easy to create and share torrents using the public list of torrents, but this is a way where you can BE the torrent tracker. I also found stories about this on Torrent Freak as well. In case the mainpage goes down, here are the files on sourceforge.
There are two other tutorials you will find here and here if you want to get into the meat of torrent sharing.

I talked about Robot Unicorn and the metal version recently. Well, there are other games which aren’t too bad. I don’t know it for a fact but it has to be one of the most popular games on that site, easily.

Google also have a Demo Lab. Demo being short for demolition.
I also found a web game like Plants Vs Zombies called Pirates Love Daisies. It uses HTML5 which doesn’t seem to work for me. Let me know if you get it working.
Talking about online games, there is this game called Robot Unicorn. It was made awhile ago and insanely popular over at the adultswim site. NOW, there isa Metal Version of Robot Unicorn which is insanely additictive like its predeccessor.

Balls deep in about 40 tabs in Firefox of Wiki links I keep clicking on, I found something that Sega wanted to keep a secret. The Sega Nomad was this system that played Sega Megadrive cartridges. So, why wasn’t it this massive success? Well, technically it was. It was practically a portable Sega Megadrive. You can play Altered Beast or 1000 different types of Sonic that came out for that console. However, it took far too many AA batteries (6 at a time) and rechargeables didn’t work in the fucking thing make it expensive as fuck to continue the power to the console. That and it was released when the Saturn came out and the Megadrive was dying a quick and painless death. So no one really gave a shit. Oh, that and it was expensive as fuck to buy ($180 USD). Plus the $80 battery pack. Remind you of any other handheld console?

Geometry Wars: Galaxies
This game has a retro look about it that is quite awesome. Granted, it has been updated. But, in a time where video games are over-done to the eyeballs in graphics and lack the real thought that went into video games like they used to, this is very refreshing. I like simple games. You use the Nunchuck and the remote to point and shoot and move around. And surprisingly, it is not all fucking gimpy like most games that use that combination are. The only problem I faced was a little lag from my remote pointer going around to shoot bad guys but when I look at other sites, none of them seem to have this problem so it could just be my setup. Addictive? You fucking bet your left nut it is. To progress, you have to earn Geoms. To get Geoms, you have shoot shit. Usually your enemies are just shapes that all behave differently. Each level has 3 different medals you can win according to the score you get. I thought getting these medals were imperative but obtaining the Geoms are far more important to progress. Looks good, handles well, the menu is ok and its replayability will be dependant on how hardcore you are on these sorts of games as there are a lot of planets and modes.

Bust-A-Move Bash!
There’s 500 levels. That’s good.
But the backgrounds are average/not exciting. That’s bad.
Multiplayer supports up to 8 players. That’s good.
In Multiplayer there is no score except a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. So it impossible to find out how much someone is beating someone else. That’s bad.
You get different balls to shoot to eliminate whole areas of bubbles/balloons That’s good.
When playing multiplayer, anyone can win just by shooting randomly at the screen. Much in the way you choose Eddie Gordo if you want to look good playing Tekken. That’s bad.
I found the controls alright. Just point at the screen and shoot. That’s good.
The sound is the same song on a fucking loop. And not a 30 minute, multi-part song with interesting solos. It’s generic as fuck. In fact, it sounds like one of those guys who performs in Casino’s with a keyboard by himself and he sings covers and REALLY gets into it but it is embarrassing to watch him. The music is like that. That’s bad.
The first 100 levels were enjoyable. That’s good.
You’d have to be an absolutely die-hard fan to sit through anymore in a single sitting as it is repetitive as shit. That’s bad.

AMF Bowling World Lanes
Why would anyone even bother making a bowling game unless you’re gunna try and make it better than the game that comes free with the console (Wii Sports)? Unfortunately, it doesn’t add anything extra of worth that the Wii Sports doesn’t already have. In fact, this game’s gameplay is pretty shit. There is no strategy and the characters you can select are all stereotypes that say stupid monosyllabic phrases like the sort of audience that would be interested in this game drag their knuckles on the ground. The graphics are noticibly bad which says a lot since it is not only a Wii (which doesn’t have great graphics to begin with) but I rarely mention graphics unless they are truly piss poor. And the thing is this is only a bowling game. At least Wii Sports has 4 other sports to choose from. With this game, if you are unhappy with the bowling component, that is it. You get better pin physics from a free iPhone app. Not to mention the swinging is unresponsive. What makes all of this worse is this is a sequel to another game just like it. And it too is shit. Turns out that they learnt nothing from their first game.

Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus
I own a classic control and was told when I turned the game on that I had to plug either the Nunchuck or the classic controller in if I want to continue. I didn’t know how the Nunchuck would work. Long story short: it doesn’t. What a gimpy fucking shitty control using the nunchuck. Use the classic controller. Without the classic controller, this game would be dead set shit. But I am reviewing this game as you would using a proper console controller like the gamecube controller or the classic controller which both works well. It’s a classic one-on-one fighting game which is not as interesting as say, Tatsunoko Vs Capcom. But, having said that there is not a great deal wrong as you have enough characters to play through and clock the game with. Graphics are fine. The game has several modes to choose from: Survival mode that lets you level-up as you go. Mission mode and Story mode and the emergence of team-based matches. Not to mention additional unlockables such as bonus characters and artwork. If you’ve played this game before, it is more of the same. Just make sure you have a classic controller. If not, it is still one of the best 2D, one-on-one fighting games for the Wii console.

Kawasaki Quad Bikes
I have tried to get into this game. I really have. I hated the Snowmobiles version of this game where you uncontrollably slide all over the place and I thought (stupidly) this time, we’d get away from controls issue because we’re on dirt. And while they have improved you from sliding all over the road a tiny bit, the controls are frustratingly laggy. I turn, it turns and after about an hour, I think I got the hang of it. But once that happened, I still couldn’t muster up enough interest in continuing to play it. There is nothing extra in the game apart from the courses which would be fine if it were a good racing game but unfortunately, it doesn’t even do that well. If I actually paid for this game, I would take it back and get the guy behind the counter to find a woman who will blow me for wasting my time. This game is that bad, I’ve re-rated Kawasaki Snowmobiles as well and taken away a star from it. Everything needs to be put into perspective. BUT, I’ve played worse games which is why this only gets 1.5 stars and not 1.

Data East Arcade Classics
I am sure these games were absolute classics in their time but unless you are 40, own a Wii and enjoy remanscing about old times, I dare say this won’t appeal to the general demographic of kids who own a Wii. The thing is, not all of these games stand the test of time. And a couple of games are practically the same game. Not to mention that the sound of these games are bleeps and bloops. Don’t get me wrong, I love em old school and they certainly don’t make them like they used to but this collection of games are not really that impressive. The only two games out of the 15 made available that I really got into is Magical Drop III and Heavy Barrel. I could play games like that again and again. Magical Drop III is a Bust-a-Move-style game that is easy to play and tough to master and Heavy Barrel is a Commando-style platform shooter. It is not as refined as some of the other Neo Geo-like games. Street Hoop is like NBA Jam but not as good. Lock ‘n Chase is a half-arsed Pacman. Bad Dudes and Sly Spy are the same game with a different theme. That coupled with shitty looking menu can only make this collection of games seem lackluster. Without Magical Drop III and Heavy Barrel, I would heavily recommend to stay away - 2 old games is still not really worth getting excited about.